IU Athletic Director Scott Dolson is Taking it Day-by-Day as Fall Sports Creep Closer

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Written by Sammy Jacobs

Indiana Director of Athletics Scott Dolson met with the media during a Zoom call on Thursday morning to talk about the health of the athletic department and the upcoming football season.

Dolson is in his first year at the helm of the Indiana athletic department after taking over for Fred Glass in July.

Dolson has plenty on his plate and probably the biggest issue, aside from keeping his student-athletes and staff safe, he is facing heading into the 2020-21 athletics year is on the financial health of his department.

“Right now, all of our conversations that I've had, which are frequent, have been with our university CFO and really working really closely with him” Dolson said. “We did that prior to Fred's departure July 1. Most of you read about the initial phase one actions we took and cutting 10% out of our budget, and what we've tried to do is really put together all kinds of different contingency plans in not knowing exactly which way we're going to pivot, but be ready for all different kinds of scenarios. And the partnership on campus and in working through everything with our CFO, he's been really, really helpful so, I guess specifically to your question we haven't gotten into exactly which direction we're going to go or anything outside of the university at this point. But the collaboration with the university's been really, really strong.”

Indiana head football coach Tom Allen donated 10 percent of his salary back to the athletic department ack in June as an effort to help make ends meet.

While the money side of things is certainly a major issue, the heath and safety of people is Dolson’s biggest worry.

Dolson said that he wants “to make certain that as I said when I started out, that we can't, we know we can't eliminate the risk. We know it's not an athletic virus, we know it's everywhere. But to try and make certain that we can mitigate it as best as possible and control what we can control. The challenge is that, you know, extremely confident in everything we've done internally and I commend everyone that's put together our plans and worked collaboratively with the Big Ten and on our campus, but at the same time our student-athletes are here two hours a day and so there's so many things that we can't control. We really work well with them and have a lot of dialogue in making certain that it's a commitment, it's a partnership that we work together on but we can only do so much on our end here, and certainly a partnership is really important. So, no question it's just the health and safety and just trying to control everything we can control.”

The question of every college sports fan these days is in regards to when football and even basketball season will start. While Dolson does not make that call he has talked with new Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren about just that numerous times.

“I feel like we took a nice step yesterday” Dolson said in reference to the 2020 Big Ten football schedule being released. “But to be honest with you, to be totally candid” he added, “I feel like we're day-to-day. And I feel like, back to what I said, one of our biggest challenges is in our communication is providing clarity. The key thing for us is that we don't get out ahead of ourselves and that we make certain that we're really deliberate. We're taking everything in to account every day. The medical advice, making certain that we're following what's happening in our localities, in our states, across the country, and really just trying to make certain that we've got a plan, we're committed.”

Dolson also addressed the question of fans being allowed into Memorial Stadium for games this season. Dolson said IU wants “to wait until the last minute and really base those decisions on where everything is locally, where we are as a university, where we are as a state and then release that plan at that point. I'm confident that we're open to, or will have contingency plans for just about any scenario out there, not only just fans in attendance, but just all of our social distancing protocols, and how would you serve concession stand food in a social distancing situation, all the different, from tailgating, to parking and there's different scenarios in each one of those. So, I'm proud of our staff and all the contingencies we've put together, worked months on them.”

2020 has not been easy for anyone and things are changing hourly it seems, but right now Scott Dolson is captaining IU Athletics into the 2020-21 season as best as he can while trying to gather all the possible date while trying to keep safety and health a priority.